Monday, September 15, 2008

Not A Waste of Time

I have not fallen off the face of the earth. Instead, I have been on a week of wonderful vacation. A vacation when not a thing was done except 'vacate'!! Vacate the entire body and mind of all the things we usually do day in and day out. NO schedule! NO plans! Well...only one. That was not to sleep in and waste the day by sleeping it away!

How wonderfully relaxing it was. However, I think more relaxing for me than for Jim. He is definitely the "goer" of the two of us but he said he enjoyed it, too! We ended up doing small 'jaunts' around home and they were a lot of fun.

Probably the trip we enjoyed the most was to Weedon Wildlife Preserve. This place was so wonderful for us. Oddly enough it is only about eight miles from our house and we had never been there in the seventeen years we have lived here.

You enter the preserve off a pretty busy street in a city of about 1/4 million! Yet as soon as you get there...almost utter silence! After living on a peninsula of about 2 million people for all these years the silence was at first almost deafening! But it sure didn't take long to adapt back to the peace and quiet of the country we had lived in back in Ohio!!

There was a beautiful new boardwalk of about 2 miles, where you could walk and talk and not hear anything other than your own voices and wildlife. You could feel your body just start to unwind and start to settle in to perhaps what God really had in mind for us. All of a sudden you forget about all the hustle and bustle of the busy city you just left and begin to feel a peace a body seems to seek. It almost makes you wonder where we went wrong. How did we end up destroying so much of what God gave us to keep us aligned with him? Something we will never get back!

As we walked on and saw the beautiful mangroves and more of the newly placed boardwalk we came to about the end of our trail. And there...as if we had walked into heaven, there was the most beautiful lake we had ever seen. You stand frozen in place as you see such a breathtaking scene. Such peace! Such beauty. Fish jumping in the lake, birds singing, crickets chirping. It is something you forget about when you live in a big city. We needed to be reminded of places like this. You want to prolong your time here.Vacation. Time away from all we do day in and day out. Time to disconnect. This was beautiful . I wish it for all of you.